Archive for Teams

Today, Julio Teheran joined the ever growing ranks of young players to sign long term deals early in their careers, agreeing to a six year contract with the Braves that guarantees him $32.4 million, according to Ken Rosenthal. Because he has just one year of service time, this deal buys out two remaining pre-arb years, three arbitration seasons, and then his first free agent year, while also giving the Braves an option for a second free agent year at just $12 million.

The easy comparison is the Madison Bumgarner deal signed in April of 2012. Because that deal was completed after opening day, it’s officially only a five year extension, but in reality, it covers the same time period as this deal for Teheran, and could be more accurately described as a six year deal since the extension didn’t kick in for 12 months from the signing date. Bumgarner got $35 million in guaranteed money for those six years, and he gave up two free agent years as team options for $12 million. Teheran got a little less in guaranteed money, but also surrendered one fewer free agent year. Regardless, the two deals are very similar, and there’s little question that the Braves used Bumgarner’s contract as something of a template for this Teheran deal.

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It’s a simple thing to say, but there’s an important interplay between the swing and the miss when it comes to pitching. In order to get a swinging strike, you need to get the batter to swing and you need to get them to miss. These are, in effect, two different skills, even if the best pitchers are awesome at both. And so it’s not surprising that we have two different metrics for that moment — whiffs per swing (whiff% in some places) and whiffs per pitch or swinging strike rate (swsTR% here). We probably need both. Is one better?

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For the Orioles it’s been an offseason of mostly quiet contemplation, interrupted only by brief attempted dalliances with Grant Balfour and Tyler Colvin. At last, though, they are stirring again, reaching a three-year agreement with Korean righty Suk-min Yoon worth a reported $5.75 million. The contract, like the others were, is pending a physical, so perhaps it would’ve been wiser to hold off on writing this for another few days, but let’s just assume this is going to be official. Let’s assume the Orioles know what they’re getting into.

Yoon’s a risky sort with limited upside, and there are real questions here that’ll be discussed later on. There’s a reasonable chance Yoon never throws quality innings in the bigs, and there are reasons why he’s signed for less than the market rate of one single win. But let’s just get something clear: this is hardly any money, especially given the three-year guarantee. More money this offseason was thrown at Garrett Jones. A similar amount of money was guaranteed to Willie Bloomquist. Michael Morse got more money. Chad Qualls got more money. Edward Mujica got a lot more money, despite ending up last year with shoulder fatigue. It should be recognized that this is a small commitment, with upside more in terms of potential value than potential ability on the pitcher’s part.

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Speculating about how much money it would take to sign Mike Trout to a long term deal has become something of a sport unto itself. Ever since he broke into the big leagues and almost immediately established himself as the best player in baseball, people have wondered aloud about what kind of deal he could command. The fires were stoked even further when the Angels decided to renew his contract for just $510,000 last year, allowing him to rack up another +10 WAR season and get even closer to free agency. Now, with just four years of team control remaining, the Angels are reportedly hoping to get Trout signed to a long term deal that will keep in Anaheim for the foreseeable future.

So, let’s play the Mike Trout Extension Game again. With Freddie Freeman resetting the extension market for players with three years of service time, we have a new data point to work with anyway, and so we probably need to update our prior estimates to reflect the new reality of extension pricing. So let’s work through the numbers and see what we can come up with.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the St. Louis Cardinals.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Cardinals or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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A little over a month ago, I wrote this piece, examining how minor league catchers cut down on their passed ball rates over time. Indeed, anyone who peruses Baseball-Reference minor league catcher pages probably notices the tendency for teenage backstops to let pitches by them at alarming rates, only to ultimately settle into a more acceptable range as they reach their mid-twenties. On at least an anecdotal level, one can observe a similar phenomenon with left-side infielders–third base and shortstop are the most error-prone positions, and these tendencies can be blown up by inexperience. The worst qualified fielding percentage by an MLB shortstop in 2013 was Jed Lowrie‘s .962, and the worst from a qualified third baseman was Pablo Sandoval’s .940, but in, say, the Low-A South Atlantic League, ten of the fourteen third basemen who got over fifty games at the spot fell below that .940 fielding mark, and twelve of the fifteen shortstops didn’t break .962. And the short-season levels are a level of magnitude worse than that.

As with catchers, then, we can assume that left-side infielders cut down on their error totals significantly as time goes on. In this piece, I’m going to examine the development of shortstops in this area.

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Derek Jeter announced today that the 2014 season will be his last, bringing an end to a career that will have spanned 20 years. And while Jeter may be most famous in the statistical community as the poster boy for modern defensive metrics, the reality is that even with his lack of range at shortstop, he’s still easily one of the greatest players of all time.

The basic numbers: Among players who have played at least 25% of their games at shortstop — the qualification needed to show up at the position on our leaderboards — Jeter ranks 6th in WAR. Of the five guys ahead of him, three played (at least in part) in the 19th century. One of the others spent nearly as much time at third base as he did at shortstop. Essentially, over the last 100 years, Cal Ripken is the only full time SS we’ve seen that has posted a higher career WAR than Jeter.

So maybe the mainstream media has overrated Jeter over the last 20 years, but if they have, they’ve slightly exaggerated the greatness of one of the greatest players of all time. This isn’t a Ryan Howard or Jack Morris situation, where the narrative has turned an okay player into a superstar based on myth and legend. Jeter is a legitimate legend on his own merits, with no embellishments needed.

We don’t need to do any kind of career retrospective now, since his career is not yet over, but as a member of the community who has often pointed out Jeter’s defensive deficiencies, I will happily point out that even those flaws don’t keep him from being one of the premier players of his generation. Congratulations on a terrific career, sir.

A.J. Burnett’s been real good for two years, and he was better last year than he was the year before, so there’s good reason to believe he’ll be an effective pitcher in 2014. On paper, he was one of the best pitchers available this offseason, but for the longest time he was a special case because it seemed like he’d either retire or return to the Pirates. Only more recently did Burnett express his desire to play, and his openness to playing elsewhere. Immediately he looked like an interesting short-term target for probable contenders. What’s happened instead is that the Phillies have signed him, for a year and $16 million.

The Phillies were long thought one of the finalists. It seems Burnett didn’t want to stray too far from home, and that eliminated plenty of would-be interested baseball teams. And I want to make it clear that one-year deals for good players are usually good deals, and for the Phillies, I don’t have a big problem with this roll of the dice. But Burnett probably took the biggest contract, and he wound up with a mediocre ballclub. Burnett probably doesn’t make the Phillies a playoff team, and an interesting question concerns what might happen in June or July.

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There’s this town in Wisconsin near where I grew up. To put it bluntly, it stinks. Not in the high school sports “you stink!” sense, the town actually smells bad. It is home to some paper mills, and the byproduct of paper mills is a certain odor. I don’t mean to make it as if the place smells like a garbage dump or sewer, but it’s pungent enough to cause a nose wrinkle. That is, it wrinkles the noses of the outsiders. The people who live there, the people exposed to it every day, they don’t notice it anymore. It’s the phenomenon known as the shifting baseline. When a town has smelled the same way for so long, people tend to shift their perspectives about how towns should smell. This idea, of course, applies to pretty much anything. But for this town in Wisconsin, it’s the smell. For the Minnesota Twins, it’s the middle infield.

The Minnesota Twins have put up some pretty poor seasons as of late. But they were pretty good not that long ago having made the playoffs six times between 2002 and 2010 (what they did in those playoff games is a different story).  They have employed Johan Santana when he was good, Francisco Liriano when he was good the first time, Joe Nathan, Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter, a pre-concussion Justin Morneau, and even squirreled some late-career heroics out of Jim Thome in the past few years. They were a mid-market team in a fairly week weak division, and some good development and some luck swung in their favor. Their middle infield has been an exception, however.

The middle infield for the Twins has been a veritable wasteland for the past 15 years. Players like Luis Rivas, Alexi Casilla, Matt Tolbert, Luke Hughes, Brendan Harris, Cristian Guzman, Juan Castro, Adam Everett, Eduardo Escobar, and Tsuyoshi Nishioka have been the Twins’ representation up the middle. They traded Carlos Gomez for J.J. Hardy. They then traded J.J. Hardy for two relievers who have yet to make the majors. Nishioka was supposed to be their next big hope, as they paid $5.3 million in posting fees to negotiate bringing him over from Japan. He stunk, broke his leg, came back and continued to stink. They sent him and his $3 million salary to Triple A for 101 games, in fact, to no avail. It’s been a rough going, is the point of this paragraph.

And so when one Brian Dozier provided even the faintest hint of being close to decent, the Twins looked like they may have shaken their no-hit-infielder blues. Dozier was drafted as a college shortstop in the 8th round of the 2009 draft. He played multiple infield positions in the minors, but  got most of his work in at shortstop. When he was called up in 2012, he was deposited at short. It did not go well. He had a dismal 64 wRC+ while being so-so defensively. The Twins were struggling as a team, so they had no problem letting Dozier try and work things out during the season. It never happened. It seemed as if Dozier was destined to succumb to the destiny of Twins infielders past.

In 2013, Minnesota decided to place Pedro Florimon’s glove at short. Florimon can’t hit either, but the Twins saw his glove as at least some kind of asset at the position. Dozier was moved to second base, and, at least in comparison to past performances, flourished. His defense improved. He started hitting for more power, knocking 18 homers in 623 PA. He nearly doubled his walk rate. Everything was coming up Brian Dozier. By now, you’ve clicked on Brian Dozier’s player page and seen that his 2013 performance ended with a 101 wRC+. This is true. But for Twins fans, he must seem like a godsend. The baseline has shifted a little over the past 15 years.

These are the Twins second baseman since 1998 who have accumulated at least  400 PA in a season.

Dozier comes in tied for second in WAR, and tied for second in hitting. I’m going to repeat that for clarity; over the past 15 years of Twins second baseman, the second-best hitting performance came in at 101 wRC+.

So, what changed? What turned Dozier from a failed experiment at shortstop to a viable option at second? He turned 26 near the start of the 2013 season and had three full seasons in the minors, so it’s not as if he was rushed. Though he could just be a late bloomer, that’s not out of the question. He cut down on his overall swing percentage, with a 10% drop in swings at pitches outside of the zone. It could be that he needed more time against major league pitching to figure things out. Another component could come from his switching defensive positions.

While it’s hard to quantify, there are many stories of players turning things around offensively after switching to a position they were more comfortable in. If defensive metrics are telling a true tale, Dozier didn’t seem all that comfortable at short. One of his bigger problems was getting the ball to first. While errors certainly don’t tell the whole story, he committed nine throwing errors at short in 2012 versus just one at second in many more attempts in 2013. It could be that his arm just wasn’t strong enough, or it could be that his lack or range lead to hurried and off-balance throws. He seems to have decent enough range, but could also have been getting help from Florimon in reducing the ground he needs to cover.

It could be that the reduced pressure of playing second helped him at the plate. Perhaps not having to work as hard on defense allowed him more time in the cage, or just a clearer head in the batters box. It could be that these things are mutually exclusive, but it’s probably a safe bet that the defensive move helped his hitting at least a little.

Steamer, Oliver, and ZiPS project Dozier to regress offensively. Oliver sees a big jump in defense, but the others see it staying about the same. He’s only had one season at second, so it becomes hard to project, especially if the uptick in offense thanks to the defensive switch is a real thing. The Twins are on the upswing, but still have a good amount of things to address. Their bullpen was pretty much the only bright spot last season. They have some heavy hitters coming up in the system, and have switched philosophies slightly when it comes to pitching — looking to collect more hard-throwing pitchers rather than their usual low-velocity strike throwers. If Dozier can play well enough to keep his spot, he may be around long enough to see the team’s latest renaissance. If he does, the middle-infield baseline will have shifted for the first time in a long time for Minnesota.

Last week, Colin Zarzycki reviewed the Milwaukee Brewer bullpen on RotoGraphs. The projected bullpen included the likes of Jim Henderson, Brandon Kintzler, Tom Gorzelanny, Michael Fiers, and Will Smith, among others. The 12 names on the depth chart combined for 12.009 years of MLB service time, with Gorzelanny accounting for half of that total. The depth chart contained some intriguing upside, but was certainly lacking in experience. Enter Francisco Rodriguez, again.

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